Steam's Hardware Survey Shows Not Much For Linux

[Gps4l]

Ray tracing is only about the light in a scene.

Until now ? Its too much calculation for use in games.
It is already used for static renders.

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/cs4300old/s11/L21/Raytracing_reflection.png

My guess would be, that you need solids, if you want a fully destructible object.
But those are to heavy for gaming too.

I cad programs you can see the difference between solids and lets call them boxes. ( wire frame models with surfaces)

When you cut a solid in half, its like when you saw through a wooden beam.
The second one is like you saw through a paper box.

The second one is used in games.
Thats why if you get outside a map in a game, you do not see most of the surfaces.
You can only see them from one side, if you look from the other side you see nothing.

I made some maps for a game, and you could use solids, but as soon as you made the map ready for the game, all solids were converted into surfaces.

[Kivada]

That has absolutely nothing to do with ray trace rendering.

Really? The articles I read on it made it sound like ray tracing would open up real world physics as you would no longer be limited by wire frames and hit boxes and all models would have layers like flesh and bone.

Maybe it's just my want for a super realistic game bleeding through.

[AJenbo]

Remember, ray tracing would allow for vastly improved physics, fully destructible environments, real damage calculation instead of percentages and head shots. Wouldn't it be fun to play an MMORPG where you can cripple your enemies with a strike to the leg or be able to cleave off an arm without killing them?

That has absolutely nothing to do with ray trace rendering.

[dee.]

Last I checked UT4 Ray Tracing version was still unplayable even at 800x600. Now this was a few years ago, but seeing as there is no rush to ray tracing in the gaming industry even though processing power has increased significantly says that the hardware still is nowhere near there yet.

Remember, ray tracing would allow for vastly improved physics, fully destructible environments, real damage calculation instead of percentages and head shots. Wouldn't it be fun to play an MMORPG where you can cripple your enemies with a strike to the leg or be able to cleave off an arm without killing them?

But so would a fully voxel-based 3d-environment. Minecraft is already an example of fully destructible environment implemented in voxels, kind of... now imagine that but with way more detail, way higher resolution, with an environment consisting of scalable voxel objects... sparse octrees can reduce the required memory and rendering time considerably. The downside is, that current hardware and API's are designed with polygons in mind, which is why most implementations of real voxel graphics still look really blocky these days.

[shmerl]

Try going multi screen or to 3840x2160. Imagine having a 5 screen wrap around setup at a total resolution of 10800x3840 or 41.5MP.

It's a rather rarely used scenario for gaming I'd guess to really worry about it as the main concern.

[Kivada]

Except it already works in Unreal Engine 4, on current hardware.

Last I checked UT4 Ray Tracing version was still unplayable even at 800x600. Now this was a few years ago, but seeing as there is no rush to ray tracing in the gaming industry even though processing power has increased significantly says that the hardware still is nowhere near there yet.

Remember, ray tracing would allow for vastly improved physics, fully destructible environments, real damage calculation instead of percentages and head shots. Wouldn't it be fun to play an MMORPG where you can cripple your enemies with a strike to the leg or be able to cleave off an arm without killing them?

[Kivada]

SLI and overclocking are becoming increasingly pointless unless you do stuff like bitcoin mining or other high performance computing. For gaming it's more of an overkill.

Try going multi screen or to 3840x2160. Imagine having a 5 screen wrap around setup at a total resolution of 10800x3840 or 41.5MP.

[honeybadger]

Survey doesn't show everybody, it prompted me only once, and I've been using Steam since open beta started. Anyway, Linux support for Valve is a long-term investment, and it isn't supposed to pay off right away. I don't dual boot, and I buy only Linux games.

[Gps4l]

Not much improvement over 1% for Linux, and that's how it's gonna stay until Valve REQUIRES all new titles be OS agnostic, Win/Mac/Linux installs required at launch for ALL new titles including AAA ones. Bottom line, they have to be willing to tell EA, Ubisoft, Activision, etc. to go to hell in the short term until those companies decide that the money they are losing by not having the games on Steam outweighs the cost of making their titles work on all three major OSes.

What Valve is doing right, the way I see it, they have a distribution platform.

A developer from croteam ( serious sam 1,2,3 ) stated they always wanted to support Linux, but they did not want to distribution for Linux.
Steam coming to Linux was for them the solution.

Serious Sam 1,2,3 has already openGL support.

Valve also can help game developers by porting their games to Linux.

Things are moving slow, but already more game companies are at least looking serious at Linux.
One of the reasons being, Linux users asking for Linux versions on the forums.

Another issue is of course that if a gamedeveloper starts today, with Linux support, for their new games, it will be months, or longer before these games become available.

But I see already a change. Most companies replied when people asked for a Linux version, negative.
Their attitude is already changing.

It takes a while to change the world, but like Nvidia, companies see the advantage of openGL. Its not bound to any os, like DirectX is to windows.
Porting a game that already supports openGL is far more easy.

Sadly openGL is also an issue, about 15 years ago , many more games engines supported both directX and openGl.
But today not many game engines do.

I do hope Valve is smart enough, and I am optimistic, that they realised these things from the start.

I remember a interview with Gabe, were he stated he knew the weeks spots of Linux.
The graphic drivers ( which is already changing) and the sound system.
For those wondering who Gabe is:
Gabe Logan Newell (born November 3, 1962) is the co-founder and managing director of video game development and online distribution company Valve Corporation.

[yogi_berra]

It could be used by jesus christ himself and it wouldn't matter.

To be fair, if Linux could turn water into wine it would be incredibly attractive for things other than cheap web servers.